Brown

Brown belongs to the third great class of European surname. Not a trade like Smith, not a father's name like Jones, but a description of the man himself. The root is Old English brun, through Middle English broun and alongside Old French brun, applied for the colour of a man's hair, a dark complexion, or the cloth he habitually wore. Onomastics calls these cognominal surnames, the broadest class of all: appearance, temperament, habit, anything a neighbour could point at.

No lesser origin than a trade. The University of the West of England's four-year study of British and Irish surnames, finished in 2016, catalogued 45,602 names, over 90 per cent native to Britain and Ireland, and found Brown among the commonest in the United Kingdom. Richard Coates, who led it, placed the name exactly here: "names where the origin describes the original bearer such as Brown, Short, or Thin". In Scotland it stands third, behind Smith and Wilson.

A byname is not yet a surname, and the difference is everything. Gaelic Scotland kept the older, living system into recent memory, showing the machinery before names froze. Raibeart Bhan, "fair Robert", was a Robert with light-coloured hair; Dòmhnall na Cluaise had lost an ear in a fight. Each name described one living body, needed no clerk, and died with him. His son earned his own.

The written record catches the moment description stopped dying with the man. The early spellings still carry the definite article, the giveaway that a clerk is describing rather than naming: Richard Brun, le Brun le mercer between 1111 and 1138; William le Brun in 1169; John le Browne as late as 1318. Beside them the article is already falling away: Agnes Broun in 1296, John Brown of Stamford in Lincolnshire in 1312. That dropped word is the whole event. By 1400 most English families and most of Lowland Scotland carried a hereditary surname, and Brown had stopped meaning a brown-haired man and started meaning his grandchildren.

A trade name needs a trade and a patronymic needs a naming custom, but a colour needs nothing at all. Every language has the word, every settlement had a dark man in it, and so the name was made independently in a hundred places that had never heard of each other. Brown is Braun in German, Bruno in Italian, Le Brun in French, Donn in Gaelic, not one name that travelled but one habit of speech running in parallel. The same logic made Moreno in Spanish and Schwartzkopf in German, and set Brown in English beside the record's other colour bynames: Black, White, Grey, Reid or Read.

The root ran deeper than the surname. Old Norse had the byname Brunn, uncommon in England after 1066. On the Continent the related name Bruno was borne by the Dukes of Saxony from the 10th century or earlier, and by Bruno of Cologne, 1030 to 1101, founder of the Carthusian Order.

The surname is first recorded in East Lothian, early and near the top of society. Sir David Le Brun witnessed the laying of the foundation of Holyrood Abbey in 1128, having given lands to the abbey in return for prayers said for the health of his son. The name is thin but real in the oldest Scottish archive: the People of Medieval Scotland project surveys more than 8,600 records from 1093 to 1314, and lists 26 Brouns and 14 Browns.

Out of East Lothian came the chiefly house, the Brouns of Colstoun, who held royal favour and who claim descent from the royal house of France. The only evidence offered is the coat of arms itself: Gules, a chevron between three fleur-de-lis or, under the motto Floreat majestas, "let majesty flourish". Three gold lilies are suggestive, but they are not a charter, and no document has ever carried the descent back to France. The rest stands on firmer ground: marriages into the Scottish nobility including the chiefly house of Clan Hay, Sir John Brown of Fordell commanding the royalist army at Inverkeithing in 1651, Patrick Broun of Colstoun created a Baronet of Nova Scotia in 1686, and the chiefship held today by Sir Wayne Broun of Colstoun, 14th Baronet.

Most Browns are not descended from Colstoun. A descriptive byname arises wherever there are people, so the name grew independently in every parish from Caithness to Galloway, thickest today in the north-east and the central belt, and again across the Northumberland and Yorkshire belt, where clerks wrote it without consulting Aberdeen. To carry the name is to inherit that whole story, not to be a cadet of one castle.

Four tartan setts carry the name, but Scottish clan tartans generally date from the 19th century, when clan societies and tartan manufacturers drew up sept lists tying as many surnames as possible to a clan, historical connection or not. The older rule was looser than the myth anyway: the Scottish Parliament's act of 1587 described followers depending on chiefs "by pretence of blood or place of their dwelling".

Two further routes fed the name, both contested. The historian Black asserted that Browns of Celtic origin might descend from the brehons, the native judges: Scottish Gaelic Mac-a-Bhruithainn is built on a root close to the word for judge and sounds much like Scots Broun. Separately, Gaelic Donn simply means brown, and the Mac A Brehon family of County Donegal have anglicised as Brown or Browne since about 1800.

Carsluith Castle in Galloway was held by the Browns from the 16th century, their arms carved above the door beside a date beginning 156-, and Bruntsfield House in Edinburgh was the other seat of the Brouns. Tower houses and burgh mansions, not earldoms: that is the truer shape of the name.

The Browne spelling carried further. Sir Thomas Browne, Sheriff of Kent, took Betchworth Castle by marriage and rebuilt it as a fortified house in 1448. In Ireland, Sir Valentine Browne became ancestor of the Earls of Kenmare at Ross Castle, the Brownes who became Marquesses of Sligo built Westport House and held it until 2017, and Ashford Castle was granted around 1670 to the Brownes, Barons Oranmore. Lielstraupe Castle was sold in 1780 to Georg Graf Browne, Governor General of Livonia.

John Brown of Haddington, 1722 to 1787, was the great Scottish biblical commentator of his century, his Self-Interpreting Bible still being reprinted in the 20th. Robert Brown, a Montrose minister's son, sailed as naturalist aboard the Investigator to chart the coasts of Australia, named the cell nucleus, and observed the restless motion of pollen grains in water that still carries his name. Thomas Brown of Edinburgh made his name in philosophy, Sir Crum Brown in chemistry.

George Mackay Brown of Stromness, 1921 to 1996, was the great Orcadian poet of the post-war era, and John Brown, 1826 to 1883, Highland servant and confidant of Queen Victoria, was one of the most talked-about commoners of the 19th century. And James Gordon Brown, born in Kirkcaldy in 1951, was Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1997 to 2007 and Prime Minister from 2007 to 2010; like his Kirkcaldy predecessor Adam Smith, his trade was the political economy of a small nation governing a much larger one. A stranger's remark about a man's hair now sits on a Bible commentary, a law of physics, a body of Orkney poetry and a British premiership.